


pour a torrent of light into our dark world

by lurknomoar



Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley, Greta Helsing Series - Vivian Shaw
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Backstory, Gen, Loch Ness Monster, Redemption, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-25 20:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17732090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: An old vampire and a new vampire get together to talk about life, love and lakemonsters.





	pour a torrent of light into our dark world

Grisaille startled as the door of the tiny tearoom flew open: there were little metal chimes hanging from the doorframe, and their off-key jangle seemed less and less charming as time went on and various people came in, or ventured back out into the rain. Grisaille himself was slightly more damp than he would have preferred to be, and the cozy warmth of the Gunpowder Teashop did little to soothe his mood. The only reason he even came up to Inverness, all the way from London, was to check on Emily, and despite Ruthven’s reassurances, he wasn’t entirely certain it had been a good idea. Ruthven was a mentor to the hapless baby vampire, and Grisaille was just an acquaintance, a bad memory. The unfortunate fact that he was partly to blame for the given baby vampire’s heinous undead state… probably didn’t help. Showing up on her figurative doorstep would look less like a friendly visit and more like interference, a casual threat. But Ruthven was caught up in managing that poltergeist outbreak in Bromley, and he couldn’t take the time to drive up to Scotland. So he asked Grisaille to go instead, Grisaille, who had never learned to drive, and so had to spend thirteen undignified hours on the long-distance bus, trying to work his way through a bilingual edition of Rumi’s poems and dozing off every few pages. This whole thing had been a terrible idea.

A new figure barged into the room with a resounding jangle, and a few seconds later the flapping pile of raincoat resolved into the familiar, slight figure of Emily.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, sounding more tired than sorry. ‘You know what it’s like in moulting season.’

Grisaille did not, so he made a noncommittal noise, and had a better look at the girl. She was wearing a massive knit jumper over bright pink leggings, and her hair was styled into something that had recently been a short pixie cut, and was now growing out in multiple, equally unflattering directions. There was high colour in her cheeks. Big sparkly letters on the front of her jumper announced _I woke up like this._ Somehow, she looked wonderful. She looked timeless and ideal, like jumpers and leggings were the one reasonable thing a person could wear. She collapsed into an armchair next to his table, and did so with effortless vampiric grace. He knew he was looking at the same girl he had first seen in the catacombs of Paris less then a year ago, a girl crazed with fear and shame and uncontrolled bloodlust, but he didn’t quite believe his eyes.

‘You look good,’ he said, an empty formality that also happened to be a truth. ‘Can I get you something?’

‘Hot chocolate would be nice, thanks,’ she said. ‘I was so happy when I found out my stomach could still handle chocolate if it was in liquid form! I almost cried.’

Grisaille nodded, and went to get them drinks: extra large hot chocolate for her, Lady Grey with a splash of milk for himself. He didn’t use to like tea, but Ruthven drank copious amount of it, and it grew on him, over time.

By the time Grisaille returned with two steaming mugs, Emily was tapping away at her phone. She looked up in acknowledgment, bent back over the phone to finish her message, then slipped it into her pocket, and took a careful sip of the chocolate. Maybe to avoid conversation, maybe to allow him to start it.

‘So, how’s the internship going?’ he asked, when he couldn’t think of anything more specific.

‘Oh, it’s great,’ she smiled. ‘I mean it’s real difficult, I end up dead tired most days, imagine spending ten hours in a wetsuit every day. The water’s cold as anything, visibility is shit, and let me tell you, I might be sturdier than I used to be, but the heavy lifting is still heavy. These beasties have big slippery flippers that weigh more than your average car, and it’s my job to try and arrange them in the right angle to work with.’

It was the doctor’s idea to send Emily up to the Loch Ness Megafauna Reserve for three months, and she was the one to convince Ruthven that there was no harm in letting his protegee out of sight. After all, she argued, Emily wasn’t going to learn all that a monster vet needed to know if she stuck to metropolitan areas.

‘And what was it that you said about moulting season?’ he asked, stirring his tea.

‘Well, _C_ _ryptoclydus niseag_ looks like it has smooth skin, from far away, but it’s actually covered in fine scales, and they moult every spring. Normally it goes fine, but very old animals, or young ones with joint problems and flexibility issues and such, they have trouble getting rid of all the excess tissue, and that leads to all sorts of weird behaviour. Biting themselves, scraping themselves against rocks to get the dead skin off, you name it. Removing it manually is not pleasant either, but it lets them move freely again.’

‘Sounds like a job and a half.’

‘It is.’

‘How about the accommodations, do the doctor’s friends treat you all right?’

‘Yeah, I’m staying at Nurse Seacole’s, in Drumnadrochit. Her guest room is in the attic and I can barely straighten up in it, but it’s all right, for the duration.’

A longish, semi-comfortable silence ensued. Emily took a sip of her hot chocolate, Grisaille took a sip of his tea, burnt his lips a little, considered it below his dignity to hiss out loud and merely grimaced. He couldn’t exactly avoid the next question, the question he came up here to ask.

‘Can you find enough to eat?’

Emily gave him a disbelieving look. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it, and spent a few moments in quiet thought.

‘Thank you,’ she said finally. ‘It’s actually really good to know that you worry about me – that Ruthven worries about me. And I get that he worries. He had to teach me the very basics. If it wasn’t for him, and you, and the doctor, I would have starved, or I would have just randomly chomped down on people, which is worse. But I’m fine, I really am. I have it figured out.’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Grisaille, but apparently the habitual note of irony crept into his voice, because Emily’s face assumed a stubborn, defiant expression.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Greta came up here a month ago, with three pints of fresh blood. Just in case, she said, for rainy days. All that blood is still in my freezer. I would have had it if I needed it, but I never did, I never went hungry.’

‘So where do you hunt, then?’ asked Grisaille. It wasn’t a question he’d have asked of a grown vampire on her own territory, and they both knew it.

‘Library bathrooms,’ answered Emily, with a shrug.

‘That’s a bit unusual.’

‘Well, it’s an enclosed space, people go in one by one, for the most part they are sober and unaltered, nothing stronger than caffeine and low-dose prescription meds, so there’s less risk that I drink something that sets me off. The average student is so stressed and sleep-deprived that they don’t really notice that they’ve lost five minutes and are feeling a little light-headed. Plus I blend right in with them, there’s nothing suspicious about me hanging out in a uni library. I even got myself a library card!’

‘You got a library card to hunt.’

‘No, I go to the library to hunt, I got the library card to borrow books. There’s not much sense in me trying to get that English degree anymore, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got to stop reading, does it?’

Grisaille nodded in acknowledgment.

‘And what was that the doctor said, about a witches’ coven?’ he continued.

‘They’re not a coven!’ protested Emily with a shudder. ‘They’re a group, if that. Greta knows about them, they’re fine. Just a dozen or so humans trying to collect safe and functional workings of magic. They’re in the know about the supernatural, including vampires, through family or history or some sort of accident. I met them at the library, too. Well, I met Kelly, the group secretary. I tried to feed on her, she shook off the thrall and insisted that I let her formally introduce herself.’

‘Did she let you feed on her, afterwards?’

‘Yeah, but she asked me to go easy on the thrall. She wanted to know what it felt like.’

‘There are some humans like that,’ said Grisaille. ‘I’ll never get used to it.’

‘Most of the group is like that, actually,’ replied Emily. ‘They asked me to help out with some of their projects, mostly they need a bodyguard when they’re out collecting herbs or casting runes at night. And they pay me in blood.’

That was an unusual arrangement, but not unprecedented. But Emily continued.

‘Back in Paris, with… you know, feeding always meant killing. Worse than killing. Eating someone alive. It was horrible but I was too hungry to ever think about it. And now, when I hunt, I am very, very careful. I always drink from healthy adults, and I always take small portions – I’d rather bite three people for a single meal than leave one person anemic. I always leave them with the suggestion that they ought to take a break, eat something, drink something. I even put some small change in their pocket so that they’ll remember to get something from the first vending machine they pass. I write myself a feeding schedule, with daily and weekly target I have to hit, because I never ever want to get hungry enough to lose control. I’ve got it under control, I do. But...’

‘But what?’ asked Grisaille, leaning forward. He vividly recalled all the orgies where he himself drank the blood of the soon-to-be dead, and he remembered that he felt no pity for them, no horror at how low he had sunk. He was centuries past such scruples, and it felt quite uniquely terrible to be reminded what scruples felt like.

‘But it feels so much better to drink from someone willing,’ she said, in an embarrassed rush. ‘Someone who knows what’s happening, and wants it to happen, and doesn’t need thrall, or just a little bit, to take the edge off. It feels so weird, to drink someone’s blood directly from their wrist at a kitchen table with six other people looking at you, but it’s. Such a relief, you know? Everything just feels all right, that way.’

Grisaille nodded – he knew the feeling, but he hadn’t experienced it in a rather long time.

‘And yes, before you ask,’ continued Emily. ‘I do have someone and it’s not a vampire hunter, I checked.’

‘I wasn’t going to ask,’ demurred Grisaille.

‘No, you weren’t, but Ruthven is definitely going to, so tell him I’m dating a young human named Jem, that they study Pharmacology and they have no magical skills, they’re just tagging along with the witches because they have this long-term project about using olfactory input to heighten placebo effect, and the witches know more about pungent herbs than anyone else.”

‘Hmm,’ said Grisaille, in an approving-but-noncommittal way. He hoped.

‘Also inform Ruthven that he needn’t do a background check, not like that will stop him. Maybe tell him that he needn’t hurry with the background check, because we’re taking it real slow. They’ve got their baggage, I’ve got mine, what with the whole undead bloodsucking fiend thing, so it’s not like we’re going to elope anytime soon.’

As a punctuation mark at the end of that sentence, she stirred her hot chocolate, then licked her spoon.

‘Speaking of Ruthven’, she continued. ‘What’s going on with you two?’

‘Nothing much,’ said Grisaille evenly, and not exactly truthfully. Emily certainly knew that he was Ruthven’s lover, that he moved out of Ruthven’s house only to sleep over once or twice every week. What Emily didn’t know was how horribly stupid he felt about the whole thing. He knew he could twist anyone around his little finger, he knew how to enchant and thrill, but he didn’t know how to handle _liking_ someone this much. Silly, peculiar, iron-willed Ruthven had him off-balance. Ruthven kept treating him to good wine and better conversation, Ruthven was sweeter in bed that anyone he’s had for a century, Ruthven looked at him and he had to bite his tongue to avoid spouting poetry: _There’s nothing left of me._ _I’m like a ruby held up to the sunrise._ That was what was going on with him.

‘All right then,’ laughed Emily. ‘You don’t have to answer that, just tell me something about yourself so that our little chit-chat looks a little less like an interrogation.’

‘Well, I rent my own flat now, a bedsit way out in Romford. I can make my own hunting ground there, and not step on the toes of any other vampires, nor leave the populace exsanguinated. I patrol it, try to keep it clean, report anything unusual.’

‘Ruthven told me that you were going back to school. What did you used to study?’

‘Well, I’ve gone to a few lectures about medicine, but my real course of study were Oriental languages. You can probably tell this was a long time ago, because Englishmen still called them Oriental languages. Since then, I have forgotten all of my Arabic and most of my Sanskrit, so I talked and thralled my way into a linguistics department to try and pick it back up. It was good to read Jayadeva in the original again, but then I got a little sidetracked.’

‘By what?’ Bless her soul, she almost looked disappointed that he was neglecting his studies.

‘Computational linguistics,’ he explained. ‘I tried to understand what it was, so I learned a bit of programming, and it was, well, easier than I expected, but a lot more interesting. I’m not a Luddite, I thought I was keeping up with modern technology, but I missed most of what was really going on in computers. And in what people can do with them. These days, you can summon a torch-and-pitchfork mob just by typing a few words. Or you can save a life, sight unseen, from the other side of the world. I don’t really get it yet, but I’m good at coding, or I’m going to be good if I spend a few months at it, it’s just another language to learn. And there’s so much to learn, so much work to do, when it comes to safety and privacy and the very fabric of truth. I want to be part of that work.’

She was smiling, and he realized she must be seeing her own hopeful enthusiasm about lakemonsters reflected on his own face, only applied to cryptography and decentralized servers.

‘Yes, I want to do good in the world, sue me,’ he said with a shrug.

‘I killed at least forty people,’ she said, her voice incongruously light. ‘I’ll never know the exact number, because for most of it, I was too scrambled to count kills, hell, I probably wouldn’t have managed to count my own fingers. Plus not all of it was all me, mostly we shared people, but if I tried to involve fractions in this… no. Anyhow, it’s a lot. And I’m thinking, well, if they didn’t stake me yet then I’ve gotta live, and if I’m gonna live, I’ve gotta save as many lives as I took, at least. And I’m nowhere near where I want to be. I mean someone I tried to feed on was a hair’s breadth away from hyperglycemic shock, so I called an ambulance and waited with him until it arrived. I broke up a fight once, bloke stabbed me in the gut with a broken bottle and it hurt for a whole day, but at least the other man, the one he had attacked, managed to get away. So that’s maybe two, and then there are the animals, I don’t count them at the worth of a human life, but they do count for something.’

‘And then there’s me,’ added Grisaille. ‘You saved my life.’

‘Greta saved your life,’ protested Emily. ‘I just did what she told me to do.’

‘She told you to save my life and you did,’ he said, glad to see the shy smile on her face. ‘And now I am alive. For better or worse.’

‘It’s for the better,’ she said with conviction. ‘If I’ve got some hope after all I did, you do, too.’

‘My number is...’ this was surprisingly hard. ‘My number is not forty. It’s...’

He didn’t know, really. Over the years, if he added it all up, the people he killed, feeding, feuding, the people he led to their death, the mistakes and missed calls, the final number was definitely in the triple digits. Maybe not quadruple, probably not, but he wasn’t sure. Her forty looked laughable by comparison. She could win herself free in a decade or so, but he was stuck chasing an absolution fully out of his reach.

‘To save that many people would take forever,’ he concluded.

‘Luckily, we are kind of, well, immortal,’ said Emily, and he had to nod, concede her point: if they had something, it was time. If the work took forever, he’ll just do it forever. It sounded daunting, but still better than spending the same forever stewing in his own sins.

‘Also I’m kind of faking it,’ she said. ‘You can probably tell that I’m trying to put on a brave face to avoid scaring Ruthven or looking like an idiot in front of you, and mostly I’m fine, genuinely,’ she continued. ‘But clearly I’m not all the way to fine, I still have nightmares that scare the shit out of me, not every night but often enough. And even awake I see things, not hallucinations, just, you know, when you’re talking to someone and you see how you could tear out their jugular, or you know you could just snap their neck, and you don’t want to know that, you want to forget the strength of your hands but you can’t.’

All of that came out in a rush.

‘Well,’ said Grisaille tentatively, ‘I cannot stress this enough: the strength of your hands saved my life.’

She laughed, with a hint of tears hiding somewhere far behind it.

‘The nightmares,’ she asked, ‘how long does it take for them to go away?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been around long enough to know.’

She took that in.

‘So. I have this to look forward to for the next hundred years.’

Grisaille considered speaking up, amending it to two hundred, but he felt like a heel, even more of a heel than usual, and just shrugged instead.

‘That reminds me,’ she said, clearly gearing up to something. ‘I know it’s not very polite, but I always wanted to ask you what your real name was.’

‘It’s Grisaille.’

‘Come on, it’s not like you still call me Sofiria,’ she retorted. ‘You must have had a name before that.’

‘I’ve had many names, yes. But I’ve used this one since before your parents were born.’

She looked as if he had struck her. Had he been that rude? No. No, it was the mention of her parents, her family that she had been torn from and can never see again.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘For the first few decades of my life, I went by Henry.’

‘Henry?’

And just like that, hearing his own name spoken aloud, he was struck by an absurd impulse to tell her, to have it all out in the open. She wouldn’t be the first person he told, he’d told Ruthven – except he hadn’t, had he? He’d _shown_ Ruthven, he’d shown him the fear and the guilt and the dreadful yellow eyes advancing over the snowy hillside, but he never had to force himself to say it. Maybe he could say it here, and she’d be none the wiser, maybe he could say it and it wouldn’t matter, but it would, it would, because she was a bookish little nerd with a library card – No, he wasn’t thinking twenty-first century, she was a reasonably intelligent person with internet access, if she didn’t know right away she’d know soon enough, there was no way he could possibly tell her, there was no way he could tell anyone, the clinging wet chill of the Orkney storm shivered over him and he could feel the creature’s fingers close slowly but firmly around his throat, and –

‘Clerval. Henry Clerval.’

The moment he said it, he saw her face pass from polite incomprehension to the shock of recognition to downright alarm. She cast about for something to do, then she awkwardly pushed her half-finished hot chocolate over to him across the table.

‘Drink,’ she said, and her eyes carried the slightest suggestion of thrall. Not enough to command, not really, but he fell back into it gratefully, and upended the hot chocolate into his mouth. It was no longer hot, not even warm, and he really would have preferred something stronger, blood or vodka or both, but as the sweetness spread on his tongue, he felt the horror recede.

‘Thank you,’ he croaked.

She just looked back at him, grim but glad. Her face looked – no, not older, her face looked nineteen like it always would. It was just her facial expression, her thoughtful frown that looked a little older, like it was going to age the human, linear way. It did him good to see that, to see that one of his own kind was, despite everything, neither wholly ruined nor lost.

Emily’s phone chimed.

‘Aaand Kelly’s calling. Time to chaperone some junior witches through mandrake duty.’

She stood up, stretched, shrugged on her raincoat, waved off his offer to pay for her hot chocolate, fumbled some cash onto the table, and turned to go. Then, changing her mind within that whirlwind of movement, she stepped back from the door, beckoned him close.

‘Listen, I don’t know what your deal is with Ruthven,’ she whispered. ‘But I owe you a thanks for looking after him.’

‘I don’t -’

She rolled her eyes at him, a suddenly, incongruously childish gesture.

‘All right then, I do.’

‘He’s up to his ears in work, for months now he hasn’t had a week without a rusalka sighting or a mad bastard weremoose running around or _something_ , and he always treats everything like it’s his personal responsibility. Coming up here to check on me took some weight off him. So thanks.’

Grisaille swallowed. It was strange to think of Ruthven as a person who needed his help, who needed his comfort. Of course he did his best to be helpful and comforting, but he never really expected it to stick. Once, more than a century ago, he knew how to soothe pain and fear away. He never thought he could be that man again.

‘You’re welcome?’ he said tentatively.

She looked at him, somehow both a nineteen year old kid in stupid leggings and a regal vampire on home territory, and smiled. For a moment, he saw himself through his eyes, both a bloodthirsty ancient being of massive power and a nervy lovestruck idiot, and felt his own lips curl into a smile. For a moment, it looked like she was moving in for a hug, but she only gave him a friendly thump on the shoulder, and in a flurry of flapping raincoat and chiming doorbells, she was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Dreadful Company implies that Grisaille is part of the Frankenstein story. But it's pretty much up to the reader to decide if Grisaille is just one of the good doctor's friends, or if he's canonical Henry Clerval himself: Viktor's childhood's friend, and the monster's eventual victim. As you can see, I went with the latter option.
> 
> The title is a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, it's from a passage about Viktor's hopes for his project before everything goes wrong. It's easy to forget what his real purpose was, behind the mad scientist facade: sure, some part of him wanted to do it just to see if it can be done, but he was also genuinely invested in creating something wonderful, in making the world better.
> 
> The line of poetry Grisaille quotes is from Rumi. It's not supposed to be a love poem, but Grisaille doesn't care.


End file.
